Have you ever lost someone you loved, such as your wife or child? What would happen if you were able to travel back through time by looking into their eyes? Reperfection tells the story of Ben Freeman who discovers he has this power. By looking into the eyes of a deceased person he can go back to a time before they died.

The StoryBen comes home from work early hoping to spend a day with his wife. Unfortunately his wife is a real estate agent and has a showing and cannot take time for him. Ben is stuck home watching TV. He hears there is a car accident and his wife dies. At the funeral he leans in to take a final look at the body and his world starts to spin back to last Tuesday, before his wife died. He works to prevent his wife from leaving, only to discover someone else is affected by the change of his wife’s fate. The story circulates as Ben tries to go back in time order to prevent the accident and save his family.

The story behind this game is perfectly paced. It is a like a combination of The Butterfly Effect with a slight hint ofDexter. The results are a fun intriguing story that I couldn’t put down until I finished. The game is promoted as an interactive novel, which is accurate. This game contains more adventure game style puzzles than Girl with a Heart Of, but less than The Walking Dead. There is nothing that will stump the advanced adventure gamer for too long. I’m very impressed with how this game orchestrated the time travel, from a story telling perspective. Each time Ben goes back he should—theoretically--be starting from scratch at that point in time. However, the game included some nice hooks to limit the amount of repetition Ben has to go through.

The PresentationThe game is pitched as an Art Noir graphic novel; and Tinnitus Games took great care to make sure the visuals match up with that image. The game is told with a black and white monotone visual landscape. Each screen presents a single panel of the game. Each section of the page represents a page of the graphic novel. Although this sounds like a great idea on paper, the implementation was the worst aspect of the game.

There were very few, if any, animated sprites throughout the game. As Ben walks from one place to another he immediately teleports, without an explicit walking animation. Characters appear where they are needed to and vanish when they leave the room. Navigation between “panels” in each “page” of the game was sometimes confusing.

The animation that was in the game was primarily made use of tweens, zooms, and panning. It reminds me a web designer who just discovered Flash animations in the early days of the web. They can be cool used judiciously, but when you try to do everything at once it gets a bit busy. When Ben goes back in time the screen spins. As he discovers new areas there are automatic zooms and panning. Unfortunately, this can be headache-inducing. Thankfully the game is short enough that these issues do not become a problem.

ConclusionsMany games seem to be going the serial route these days; while telling a full story in five parts. I’m not surprised to see that Reperfection is dubbed as the first part of a longer story. This story loop for this part is closed nicely, but events are set in motion that will into at least one more game. I know I’ll be along for the ride.